Looking à Skantze: the Spectator's Turn

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Notes

1 From Susan Sontag's introduction to Benjamin One Way Street and Other Writings (1997: 13)

2 See Lavery and Whybrow (2012: 1).

3 It is also that that inaugurates the theatre spectacle itself, for, as Adrian Kear points out, ‘[f]rom the moment Sophocles's Oedipus limped his way across the tragic stage, theatre has done its thinking on its feet, however scarred and swollen they may have become (for “Oedipus” means “swollen foot” in ancient Greek)’ (2012: 22–9). In her discussion of Oedipus at Colonus at the Teatro India in Rome, Skantze ponders the fact that ‘[u]p and down the side of the theatre one could see the body of a foot and its heel … as if heroes had left the sign of their imperfection behind them in feet of clay’ (p. 53).

4 Both Sebald and Benjamin can be said to be ‘born under the sign of Saturn’, as Susan Sontag puts it (with regard to the latter), which implies a temperament and quality of observing that forces the speed of modernity to become pedestrian: ‘[t]hings appear at a distance, come forward slowly’ (cited in Benjamin 1997: 14). As a method this permits, as Benjamin himself states, ‘the simultaneous perception of everything that potentially is happening in that single space. The space directs winks at the flâneur’ (2002: 418–19).

5 Skantze describes how at the moment of incomprehension ‘the mind runs backwards over the phrase to see what you have missed. Sometimes fortunately in this backward review the mind finds the part that you have missed or misapprehended [ … ] hastily reassembles the phrase and moves again in forward motion’ (p.79).

6 If the operation of language provides one example of a revelatory memory-moment then a truly epiphanic, as well as ‘corporeally affective’, one in the personal history of Skantze's spectating occurs as she watches a dance company's performance of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba. Witnessing a particular ‘visual moment’ that vividly ‘broke open Lorca's story’ for her, she describes ‘a dance that infers the condition of stilted, misshapen, broken female bodies under patriarchal, Catholic, Franco fascist regime, and then the inference extends into associations of women caught under the regime of ballet/modern dance and its cadaverous customs, of girls still under the thumbs of disappointed women everywhere’ (p. 180).

7 There is a further mis-step involved in the translation ‘weathered threshold’– not of Skantze's making and quite possibly deliberate on the translator's part – that supplies an additional resonance or ‘stumbling stone’ in the context of deviation. Appearing as a term in a review by Benjamin of Franz Hessel's 1929 book on flânerie in Weimar Berlin (On Foot in Berlin), there is no actual reference to a ‘weathered threshold’ as such, merely the sniffing out of a threshold or doorway (‘die Witterung einer einzigen Schwelle’). In fact, according to the image conjured, this is meant in the manner of a dog compiling for itself an olfactory scent-map of the local neighbourhood (as dogs do). Where ‘weathered’ may have come into play in the translator's mind is that Witterung, here referring to ‘scenting’ or ‘sensing’, is a cognate of both ‘weather’ (Wetter) and ‘decaying’ (verwittern), but since it is not applied adjectively to Schwelle (threshold), it is far more the act of memory-sensing involved that is significant: a faint, lingering memory being the doorway to an unexpected encounter (Benjamin 1999b: 263).

8 ‘[T]he talk on the street continues the tag of nation by referring to the work as the German offering, or the Lithuanian or the South African’ (p. 12).

9 ‘The players and puppeteers demanded of the spectator that we shift, we make the transition, between the “real” stories of horrors narrated by the puppets only then to move into the realm of mean-spirited slapstick from the culpable Pere and Ma Ubu’ (p. 24).

10 ‘Even in imagination I can see how Ubu and the Truth Commission would be a different play in Johannesburg than in London or Avignon’ (p. 29).

11 Tim Supple's multilingual Shakespeare adaptation The Dream, involving the integration of seven languages, may serve as a good example here (p. 100).

12 Would Skantze have been able to come up with a similar theory based on a limited viewing of UK theatre, for instance? She is after all implicitly disparaging of the (stay-at-home) British theatre scene, which she sees as continuing to be wedded to naturalism and where ‘[e]ven the “extreme” theatre of writers like Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill follows along an action, speech, dialogue trajectory’ (p. 194).